Currently there seems to be a bit of a spat going on within what could loosely called the “sceptic movement”.
Was there a pandemic or not?
Obviously if you’re in one of the groups who think either that (a) viruses don’t exist or (b) viruses exist, but they don’t cause disease - then you’re going to answer the question with a resounding no. Since I’m not in either group (a) or (b) I’m going to attempt to answer the question on the understanding that the picture of viral infection and transmission we have is broadly correct, whilst still recognising that we don’t properly understand all of the details of how viruses do what they do (particularly when it comes to the mechanisms of transmission and subsequent infection).
You could be in a third group - that viruses exist, can cause disease, but that covid was not a novel pathogen and it was just flu (or something similar).
I’m not in this group either.
There is another group who think that viruses exist, can cause disease, that covid1 was a novel(ish) pathogen, but that what happened as a result of covid did not constitute a pandemic.
I’m more or less in this group - but I’ll need to amplify a bit on what the “more or less” means here.
Technical, Schmechnical
The definition of the word pandemic adopted by the WHO (World Hysteria Organisation) is essentially useless. Any pathogen that causes a global outbreak is, technically, a pandemic. Thus, the Snottavirus2 which causes runny noses, if it spread worldwide, would lead to a “pandemic” of runny noses.
Oooooooh - colour me petrified.
This definition is good for WHO’s business model - but as much use as a cardboard hammer for anyone else.
So, technically, covid constituted a pandemic - according to this definition and accepting the standard model of viral transmission and infection.
What’s wrong with this definition is that it has been decoupled from any notion of severity. The commonly-accepted understanding of a ‘pandemic’ is that it implies a (potentially) serious negative outcome on a global scale.
Unless you have some kind of snot phobia, then an outbreak of the Snottavirus is not going to have you slapping on the masks, getting jabbed up with an endless series of experimental Zombie Juices, or wanting to be locked in your house for months at a time.
So, henceforth, I’m going to adopt a common sense position that the word pandemic implies a measure of both global reach and severity.
The WHO can go fornicate themselves.
The Danger of Common Sense
There is a danger here. By accepting that such a thing as a ‘pandemic’ (defined in terms of global reach and severity) could exist at all - it opens up the possibility for the fears of the population to be preyed upon by the unscrupulous.
This is unfortunate, but irrelevant for the scientific question of whether there could exist a contagious and serious disease that spreads globally.
Nick Hudson, whom I enormously respect and agree with on so much, thinks not. But I disagree with his position here. Nick has described pandemics as a “nonsense construct” designed to further political and financial goals. Given what we witnessed during the covid era you’d have to have a lot of sympathy with this perspective - but I don’t think it’s correct.
I don’t really see any scientific reason why such a dangerous pathogen could not exist (although such a pathogen is much more likely to originate from some complete nutter fucking about with natural viruses in a lab).
Nick, however, is 100% correct in that we cannot allow the tyranny and climate of fear to ever be promoted again. This is true whether we think that pandemics are possible or not.
You can see the wider context of Nick’s remarks in the following article
I largely agree with Anandamide’s position here.
The problem is that a hypothetical invisible killer disease seems to prod our fear circuits more than almost anything else. Covid was not (overall) all that deadly - and yet so many people just completely lost their shit over it (as the saying goes). It’s a level of visceral fear that the KlimateKrisis™ nutters can only dream about.
How do we prevent such a fear from being weaponized again?
That I do not know.
Is there a level of sensible pandemic preparedness planning? There certainly used to be3. There won’t ever be again if the dickheads at the WHO4 get their way.
Getting Serious About Seriousness
There has to be some flexibility and subjectivity about what we mean by ‘serious’ in the context of a disease. Part of the problem is that we live in a time when the desire for “safety” has become a pernicious disease in itself.
If people can, genuinely, believe they are “unsafe” in a work environment where people can say that transwomen are not women, for example, then how much more crazy is the response to an actual harm going to be?
If covid was a modern disease, then it wasn’t very inclusive. For a time, all that mattered was covid; people were exclusively focused on minimizing covid death. Other potential harms and costs were not included in this calculus.
It was like arguing for ambulances to be driven at 5mph to minimize road deaths and congratulating yourself for how many lives thereby saved, whilst ignoring all the poor buggers who’d pegged it from the heart attack that it took the paramedics 3 hours to get to.
So, what actually happened? I’ll look at the UK since these are the stats I’m most familiar with. Here’s the chart of the raw data from the ONS from the beginning to 29th Oct 2021 in England & Wales :
There are a number of things to note about this chart that I generated from the official data.
There is a huge question mark about the veracity of what constituted a ‘covid’ death. There was, clearly, a significant degree of misattribution going on
This data is by registration date. That is, it counts death by the date the death was registered and not by when the death occurred. This can be an issue - but it shouldn’t seriously impact the observed trend here.
The ‘expected’ mortality has been constructed from a simple average of the data from the previous 5 years. This is rather crude and does not take into account a varying population size or an aging population. It’s good enough, however, to indicate a trend.
You will immediately note the presence of two big ‘humps’ in the all-cause mortality (ACM) data. I don’t think these can be entirely massaged away by age-standardization or population adjustments.
It’s important to note the timing of the first hump. This occurred at a time when the typical winter increase in mortality had finished. It was somewhat unexpected and very unusual.
It is clear, despite the various claims of “no excess mortality”, that the March/April period in 2020 represented a period of elevated mortality. It was time localized and followed a curve that could be very well-modelled by a Gompertz curve, characteristic of infections in temperate climes.
The only realistic explanation of this data, in my view, is that there was a novel(ish) pathogen doing the rounds. Even if we assume a significant proportion of the deaths (or even all) were iatrogenic or as a result of mismanagement, this does not alter this conclusion. The various doctors were responding to something, however harmfully or badly they may have responded. If there were no symptoms to treat in the first place, these iatrogenic/mismanaged deaths would not have occurred.
That is, unless one supposes that the majority of the world’s doctors suddenly turned into homicidal maniacs.
The chart above looks a bit scary, doesn’t it? But in proper context here’s a different visualization of what happened in England & Wales in 2020
The numbers here represent upper bounds - the level of covid death was deliberately overestimated to make it seem more lethal than it actually was. So, the figure of 0.14% dying of covid in 2020 is to be read as at the very most we had 0.14% dying of covid.
There is one more chart I generated that indicates the level of seriousness for different ages. Using official data and assuming a uniform infection rate across the ages one can obtain an upper-bound estimate on the level of risk if we assume an overall IFR. In this chart I used an overall IFR of 0.2% and 0.4%. The 0.4% was the overall figure Ioannidis came up with for the UK at the time.
Note the low numbers of young people affected. Sadly, my youngest daughter knew one of 183 in the age 20-29 range. He was a friend of hers at university.
These are only estimates - and upper-bound estimates at that. They should not be taken as accurate but trend-indicative. There is a last chart I generated that I want to show. It gives the cumulative death toll for the ages as a percentage of the total deaths in the respective age groups. Again we see the relatively very low impact of covid for the younger age groups (and based on official attribution of covid - which is an overestimate). The title of this chart is a bit misleading - it should be as a percentage of total covid death.
So, whilst not exactly a nothing burger, covid wasn’t a quarter pounder either.
Whether this level of seriousness nudged covid into the ‘common sense’ understanding of what a pandemic is is a matter of subjectivity. I think it probably did (just about), for me, but there’s a big caveat to that. It was not a pandemic for people under, say, 50 years of age. You can establish your own break-point here - it’s subjective, as I said.
Clearly, catching covid at the age of 90 was orders of magnitude more worrying than catching covid at age 30. But that’s probably true of catching the fabled Snottavirus, too.
But the hysterical over-reaction to it all makes me want to put the word ‘pandemic’ into quotes. I’d rather err on the side of dismissing it as a ‘pandemic’ than propping up the official fear narrative.
However, as Anandamide says in the article above, this is not a winning strategy - whatever the actual ‘truth’. A lot of people got ill. A lot of people know someone who died of this thing they got ill with. You’re going to be met with a huge, big, “oh, just fuck off” if you try to convince these people it was all in their heads, or some hoax, or just flu, or a result of 5G towers, or aliens.
My brother got very ill with it. He described symptoms he’d never had before and was in a very bad way for a bit (hospital, fingers crossed sort of level). After the danger had passed, for months afterwards he was badly affected by whatever had happened to him. He could fall asleep mid-sentence at the dinner table, for example, and there was a very noticeable decline in his cognitive capability.
In my brother’s case, despite my best efforts, he got the 2 doses of the Pfizer Zombie Juice followed by a booster - after he’d already had covid. So it’s not entirely clear whether the persistence of these post-infection affects was a result of covid, the vaxxes, or a bit of both.
So, my position is that there was a new(ish) pathogen causing serious symptoms, and even death, in some. The overall threat level, however, was mild to moderate, being closer to the milder end of that range.
The Danger of Common Sense (part 2)
Now, if what I have argued above is correct, we still have a problem. It’s clear that the majority of the world’s governments just went bonkers. The over-reaction to covid was grotesque.
But by describing it as an over-reaction to a mild-to-moderate threat, this (sort of) implies that a similar reaction of governments to something that is actually more serious would be justified.
This is a trap we need to avoid. It’s a fallacy, of course - because nothing the goons in our governments did actually worked (in health terms - it certainly worked to give them more control and bigger bank balances).
We need, somehow, to get back to those pre-covid times when “pandemic preparedness” was not synonymous with “losing your shit”. Back in 2011 (and ratified again in 2017, if memory serves me correctly) the UK was able to contemplate in their pandemic preparedness planning a much worse disease outbreak than covid and not recommend maniacal terror and hysterical over-reaction.
But, if we get our trusty tin-foil hat out of storage and plonk it on our heads, what has been firmly implanted now is the idea that things like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, social engineering on a national/global scale, and the removal of basic human rights, are right and acceptable in the event of a ‘pandemic’.
There is much work to do to, somehow, convince the majority that the gibbering fuckwittery that our governments indulged in, is not the right thing to do.
I think this is why Nick Hudson has come down so hard on the side of pandemics being a nonsense construct. It’s difficult to get people to have a sensible response to this stuff of nightmares that an invisible killer bug represents.
Mengele Visits Wuhan
I despair at scientists sometimes. There’s weird fuckers trying to figure out how to enable men to breastfeed. The deranged fuckers at Wuhan were trying to engineer a more infectious and dangerous virus capable of harming humans.
Anandamide’s article describes how it is beyond any reasonable doubt, now, that covid was engineered in a lab.
For me this is also the final nail in the coffin of the “no virus” or “it was just a flu” way of thinking.
A bunch of morally-degenerate eggheads tried (and succeeded) in altering a naturally occurring virus whose natural hosts were bats so that it could infect humans. Thankfully it turned out to be (overall) not that deadly, but is it possible it could have been otherwise? I don’t see why not - but then I’m not an expert in any of the fields that might be able to give a more definitive answer.
That covid was ‘new’ is compellingly argued, in my view, by Pierre Kory
I find Dr Kory’s arguments here to be compelling. He describes what led him, as a person (a bona fide medical expert) who treated many covid patients, to conclude this was a novel pathogen.
This agrees with other doctors I’ve read. Indeed, the doctor treating my brother, said very similar things. There was a constellation of symptoms with a new presentation and they had difficulty figuring out how best to treat it5.
This is very strong evidence that cannot be easily dismissed.
Where Does All This Leave Us?
In a right fucking mess. I’m sorry for the lack of professional decorum throughout this article - but a judicious use of potty-mouth is definitely called for when it comes to the blithering idiocy surrounding all things covid.
I am very concerned for the future. The WHO and WEF ghouls are circling the ailing patient of freedom and waiting to feed on its corpse.
Many people have had their eyes opened to it all - but many have not. Should these demented fuckers succeed in creating Disease X, and they will give it their best shot, then we can expect more of the same - and probably even more hardcore restrictions and mandates.
So, was there a covid pandemic? Yes - I would be OK with that in a sensible world. But because the world is currently a long, long, way from sensible, I’m going to continue to deride the notion that we had a pandemic and put this word in quotes for covid.
Yes - I know I should be distinguishing the pathogen SARS-Cov-2 from the disease called covid - but that’s tiresome and I’m just going to use covid for both the pathogen and the disease. There’s no real loss of clarity or understanding in so doing.
A pun-based nod to the “viruses don’t exist” camp.
The UK’s pre-covid pandemic preparedness plan considered a couple of hypothetical scenarios, one of which was an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that caused more death in a shorter time than covid. The recommendations of what to do in such an event contained almost none of the things we did when covid hit. No masks, no lockdowns, no business closures, no school closures, no social distancing, no track and trace - it did recommend that people who have symptoms should not mix freely.
Or other globalist ghouls like WEF (the World Enslavement Forum)
No, they didn’t all suddenly turn into homicidal maniacs - they (the overwhelming vast majority) really tried their utmost to save people.
Very good Rudolph - I'm almost completely aligned. See also: https://www.hartgroup.org/a-possibly-unpopular-null-hypothesis/ (summary take: "a nasty — if not particularly unusual — respiratory disease season was turned into a catastrophe by human misadventure, and this catastrophe was compounded by efforts to save face and justify the unjustifiable)". Yes, that can be a 'technical pandemic' (as you describe), much like respiratory disease can be such a (regular) pandemic every winter. But the 'novelty' could just as easily have been the same 'novelty' shown by every variant of every virus (whether produced in a lab (as they've been doing for decades) or 'natural'.
What all this doesn't explain is the complete mismatch between the claimed death count in New York and actual recorded mortality. Someone / some entities really, really wanted to scare the populace into accepting the 'measures' (lockdowns & goo). My suspicion? It was something like this: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/18/it-was-a-vaccine-strategy-from-the-start/
All you have to do is look at historical records, for a some kind of definition of epidemic and scale that to global equivalents.
For Sweden, where I'm at, that would be the cholera epidemics of late 19th and early 20th century, where several thousand people died.
The problem with that approach is of course that it doesn't take living conditions et cetera into account. Just imagine if we were to use the infant mortality numbers for London's East End during the height of capitalism and Empire as a benchmark - the numbers were worse than in Biafra or Calcutta of the 1970s.